The present invention relates to creating markup language documents containing images from computer graphics programs.
A markup language is a conventional tool for describing the contents of an electronic document that is to be viewed or printed on a computer output device such as a computer monitor. Specifically, markup language documents, particularly hypertext markup language (HTML) documents, are commonly used by Internet browser applications. A markup language document can contain text, images, hyperlinks, and JavaScript.TM..
Many computer graphics programs are available for the creation of documents. Some of these computer graphics programs, such as Adobe Illustrator, have an object-based environment, i.e., visual elements are represented as individual objects which are assembled to create the desired image. Conventional computer graphics programs generate a markup language document by exporting a single image file that represents the entire document. Unfortunately, such an image file may be very large, thereby consuming network resources, increasing download time and reducing the display speed of the browser application.
Some computer graphics programs enable a user to slice an image manually, i.e., to divide the original image into discrete portions. The markup language document generated by such programs contain references to all of the image slices, so that the entire original image is downloaded. This allows a web page designer to manually add scripting language that animates the image slices. Unfortunately, this manual slicing procedure is time consuming and thus costly.